Auto major implements RPA solution to automate warehouse operations and streamline customer order fulfillment

Highlights
  • Customer

    Fortune 500 auto major

  • Industry

    Automotive

Benefits
  • Monthly savings of 30 person-hours
  • 100% error-free process
  • Shorter customer order fulfillment cycles
  • Realtime visibility of reallocated products with an accurate location
  • Reduction in waiting time on ERP to complete the inventory transfer process
  • Improvement in the volume of customer order fulfilments closed
Business Situation

The client witnessed high levels of complexity and volatility in customer demand which made inventory management and warehouse/logistics planning difficult to manage. To counter this problem, the client needed to reprioritize and reallocate product stocks to meet the volatile customer needs. The client's workforce had to spend significant hours and investments on two specific manually intensive and repetitive tasks: backorder management of critical components, and reallocation of shipping stocks. The client needed an automation solution that could improve priority order fulfillment and optimize inventory.

Business Challenges

Our client had four key business challenges that prompted the need for a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution:

  • Need for an immediate response to high priority demand fulfillment requests
  • The volume of orders was extremely high (400+ transactions)
  • The backorder management process was manually intensive
  • The high volume of transactions and high manual intervention translated into a higher degree of manual errors creeping in
Birlasoft Solution

Birlasoft's team of supply chain management experts and automation/RPA SMEs developed the solution to solve for the above-listed challenges. The critical facets of this solution are listed below:

  • Track all the back-ordered stock and drive its movement to an appropriate location as guided by the system. By default, all the back-ordered stock would reside at a reserve location to fulfill new and urgent demand.
  • The operations team would perform necessary inventory transactions (sub-inventory transfers) by logging into the ERP system.
  • The RPA bot would capture the sub-inventory transfers and send out notifications to the shipping crew so that can they can reallocate inventory.